Mac Attack

C raig Martin wants to make one thing clear right from the start.

Classic Albums' performers belt out Fleetwood Mac's chartbusters Although he has 100

musicians traveling

around Canada and the U.S. playing songs made famous by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, just to name a few, they're not cover bands.

And they're not tribute bands either.

"We don't dress up in costume, we don't do impersonations, we don't wear wigs. We don't do any of that," Martin says.

"There's no jumping around. There's no flashy light show. There's no show. It's the strangest thing ever."

Boy, you think, this guy doesn't know how to sell his product, unless he's using reverse psychology.

Martin continues.

"But what happens is that we get on stage, and two or three songs in, the audience realizes just how much we care about the music. And this beautiful, sublime bond happens between the musicians, the music itself and the audience.

"And we're taken back to a time when we listened to these records and our imaginations were fertile and beautiful. We were just unhampered by a lot of the multi-imaging and multimedia that we're plagued with today. We didn't have self-serving rock stars firing their images down our throat. Instead, we were allowed to reinterpret this music any way we saw fit."

On Saturday, June 9, Martin's Classic Albums Live will perform Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" album from start to finish, from "Second Hand News" to "Gold Dust Woman." They'll perform the classic rock album song-by-song, note-for-note, making it sound exactly like the original.

The 1997 record was a monster rock album, selling over 30 million copies. It contains Top 10 hits such as "Go Your Own Way," "Don't Stop," "You Make Loving Fun" and "Dreams." It received a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1978. In 2001, Q magazine named "Rumours" the 68th greatest album of all time; two years later, Rolling Stone named it 25 in their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. And VH-1 declared it the 16th greatest album.

Classic Albums Live perform timeless records by musicians such as The Beatles, The

Stones, Led Zep, Van Halen, Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC and Queen. They even tackle "Are You Experienced?" by Jimi Hendrix.

What's more difficult for Martin, finding musicians who can play like the stars or singers who sound like them?

"Every album reveals itself to have a different type of challenge," Martin says. "For example, we just came off tour with the Eagles record, and that album knocked us on our ass. The 'Hotel California' album. We thought they were campfire songs, a couple of acoustics, then electric. Man oh man, that was a tough album.

"Now the same thing happened with the Fleetwood Mac record. Again, these are three-chord songs, how hard can they be? They're really tough. To get that layered harmony, to recreate Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work? He's an insane guitar player. He doesn't follow anybody else's rules. So you have to find a guy who can technically recreate it, and that indefinable quality…the right passion to capture the essence of it. That's really a tough thing."

Martin has a pool of approximately 100 musicians in Toronto that he uses for the Classic Albums Live shows.

"What I excel at is finding the right musicians," he says. "Whether they think they are the right guy or not for the job, I'll recognize something in their playing and assign them that, whether it's a Fleetwood Mac album or a Beatles record or Rolling Stones. I'll say, 'There's something here that I think will be good for you.' And sure enough, they go, 'You're right. I love this! This is perfect for me.'"

Classic Albums Live celebrated its fourth anniversary in April. The brainstorm for the concerts came to Martin when he was on his way home from a concert and heard a radio station play the entire side 1 of the Stones' "Exile on Main Street."

When Martin heard all five songs, from "Rocks Off" to "Tumbling Dice," he said, "This sounds so great, this sounds so perfect. We should do this whole album side and play it like this."

Then he thought some more, probably thinking of songs on the remaining three sides such as "Happy," "Sweet Virginia" and "All down the Line," and said, "We should do this entire record, just like this."

Then, he thought some more, and said, "We should do all the records, all the classic rock records. I knew I didn't want it to be a tribute band," Martin explains. "I wanted it to be more of a recital, more serious. Treat the music with a lot more respect.

"And I came up with the blueprint for the show, which is, we take these classic albums from the 60's and 70's and recreate these albums live, notefor note, cut-for-cut, assembling these vast musicians who will faithfully reproduce every sound and nuance on that record."

Martin goes to great lengths to get that sound. He's had orchestras on stage, children's choirs, string sections, horn sections, even kazoo players. On

occasion he's had a woman blowing bubbles in a glass on-stage.

That, he explains, is for "Octopus's Garden" from the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album. Maybe

only a handful of people in the audience appreciate that small detail, Martin says, but that sound is on the album, so it's reproduced live on stage.

The first album Classic Albums Live recreated live was Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." ("The Wall" is also in their repertory.)

Once, in Toronto, Classic Albums Live performed all the Beatles' albums back-to-back in one day in a Fab Four musical marathon. He was hoping to get into the Guinness Book of World

Records, but they didn't get listed.

"They didn't consider it," Martin

says. "It was really too tough for them to get down to a nice little sound bite. Like another band could come along and do it faster, another band could do it as well. To explain the note-for-note concept of it all, that we don't dress up in costumes, they didn't like that at all. Unfortunately, what we do takes a lot of explaining."

While not tribute bands, Martin's shows do pay tribute to a time when music was more important than marketing, and musicians took care to create entire albums that compelled fans to sit and listen from start to finish. Albums by groups such as The Beatles and the Stones would be listened to repeatedly and studied with Talmudic zeal.

"I'm going to sound like an old fogey here," he says, "but it was a simpler time, sitting on the floor of your basement with the album open in front of you, listening to the record, spending a good 40 minutes. Now it's all about the single, of course. Back then, you'd listen to the entire record.

"That kind of care isn't put into an album today. Now it's: here's the single, here's the follow-up single, here's the video, here's the tour, next. Who's next?

"There's a reason why these albums are classic, and that's because a great many of us sought them out and made them classic. I grew up on all these records too. Sure, I have my little spin-offs, I went through a Mott the Hopple phase, but ultimately, I would be like the rest of the people and want to put on a Led Zeppelin IV on a Saturday night. Know what I mean? Going to school, first thing in the morning, I'd better put on 'Dark Side of the Moon.' I had these little rituals, and these are the records that we return to for all of us. And there's a reason for that."

Audiences return to his shows too.

"People seek these shows out," Martin says. "They plan around them, make them family events, social events, spiritual. For some, it's like mecca."

Martin is happy to see different generations attend his concerts.

"Kids are getting smarter, they're getting savvier," he says. "They're getting a lot more hip and cooler than what the mainstream marketers are giving them credit for, and they're seeking out what's good. You can't hard-sell them anymore, they're too smart. Sooner or later they're going to find Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Bob Marley. These records are going to find them. And when they do, it's beautiful, it's just so great." If you go
>>What: Classic Albums Live Presents
Fleetwood Mac: "Rumours"
>>When: 8 p.m. Saturday, June 9
>>Where: The Philharmonic Center
for the Arts, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd.,
Naples
>>Cost: $32
>>Information: Call (239) 597-
1900 or (800) 597-1900 or visit
www.thephil.org